


Cloak and Dagger, Cape and Cowl

by yelp



Category: Original Work
Genre: (dis)trust, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Plot, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:47:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27789220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yelp/pseuds/yelp
Summary: "Your turn," Sara said. "Let's see who we're eating with."After a long, considering pause, the villain lifted her sleeves to the sides of her cowl. A twitch was enough to flick it back from her head, revealing a visage of pure night, a shockingly dark, impossibly gaping void cut from the cheery yellow backdrop of their kitchen.On second look, it wasn't the solid black hole, the sucking emptiness, that it appeared, but a mass of writhing tendrils instead—tangled and seething, squirming in a vague imitation of humanity, like a nest of vipers dumped over a person's head, barely clinging to it for form; or a plume of black smoke trapped in a bulb, wisps and tendrils tickling against the inner glass, ever a moment of inattention from breaking free.Sara took a quick, nervous gulp of water."Okay," she gurgled. "That's cool, you can put it back on now. Thanks."
Relationships: Heroine/Ex-villain who is technically on her team but is still kind of terrifying, Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 20
Kudos: 35
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	1. Cloak

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nowrunalong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowrunalong/gifts).



It was the cowl. 

Sara Spectacular had known, going into all this, that their hasty arrangement wasn't going to be a comfortable one. 

Of all the villains to invite into their home, her very last choice would have been the dark witch Tenebre, arcane scientist, being composed of shadows and immorality—and her greatest nemesis for years.

From the moment that long, dark cloak swept over their threshold, trailing an ominous whisper, Tenebre was inspecting her surroundings with an unsettling scrutiny, using eyes as much as sticky tendrils of shadow roving all over, touching the furniture, caressing the wallpaper, shifting one of their paintings an excruciating fraction of a degree askew. 

Sara couldn't help but catalog it all. Everything those shadows slithered over would need a thorough scrub before she'd consider it clean again. 

At dinnertime, presiding over one end of their kitchen table, Tenebre plunged her side of the room into a deep gloom that couldn't be fought back by their bright placemats, the red tulip chandelier, not even their whimsical kitchen chairs, each wooden back a hand-carved and lovingly-painted scene from nature. Their guest had commandeered the one with the fawn and starling at the head of the table, and Sara couldn't help but feel a protective instinct rising in her breast, like she ought to defend the carved animals from the villain that rested her back against them. 

And she hadn't even changed for dinner, which meant neither of them could either. Tenebre was still shrouded in her customary cloak, no line between shifting sackcloth and the shadows that threatened to spill forth from between the folds, pour endless from her voluminous sleeves. 

Unpleasant.

Reaper-like.

But, somehow, it was the cowl that wore away at Sara's last nerve. That this villain would sit at their table, and not have the decency to show her face.

That she'd pick up the fork, with whatever nebulous appendages passed for hands in the shadowy recesses of her sleeves, and gaze down at a homecooked meal through her empty, gaping hood, giving not a suggestion of humanity behind it. A literal dark spot on their bright and homey kitchen. 

Sara ruthlessly ignored the thought that the table would have been a somber one anyway, with so many empty chairs that they had yet to find the time nor the heart to clear. Priya's chair next to hers had sat barren for years now, but after the latest disaster, there were more seats empty than taken. Hank, who had fashioned these chairs with his powers, in a precious moment of downtime, would never be back to enjoy them. Xiaohe, who would have ensured fresh tulips for the centerpiece beneath the matching lamp, was felt in their conspicuous absence. 

But those weren't things that she could change. 

The supervillain at her table was.

As if reading her thoughts, M-path's hand came down on hers, firmly, just as she was about to speak.

"Pass the potatoes?" He shot the supervillain an unguarded smile, as if the many empty chairs weren't partially her doing. As if she were any sort of replacement for the comrades that they'd lost. 

Tenebre returned the smile with a glower that could be felt, even from under the hood.

That was enough. 

"How can we trust you," Sara snapped, "if we can't even see your face?"

M-path tried to shush her, but the villain was already responding in that horrible, sepulcher voice of hers—less like she was forming words with tongue and mouth, more like she was unhinging her dread maw, briefly, to allow a torrent of some constant stream of internal chanting to screech forth:

"—supers wear masks but villains must dine faces exposed is that right trust is not reciprocal trust cannot be earned—"

"This mask?" Sara said. "It doesn't even cover—"

M-path's hand on hers gave a hard squeeze. "It's a fair point. We're in this together now." He gave Sara another Look, and then rolled the blue half-covering up from the bridge of his nose. It tugged off from his forehead with a gentle snap, and then there was just Kwesi sitting there across from her, self-consciously smoothing out the tight coils of his hair. 

Reluctantly, Sara followed suit, removing the jeweled domino that had been a gift from— well, it didn't matter now. Sara Spectacular let it clatter to the table, next to her bowl, to become just Sara, plain and simple, with crease marks around the edges of her eyes, where the mask had pinched.

She could tell Tenebre was staring, from the cant of her hood, the angle of her shoulders.

"Your turn," Sara said. "Let's see who we're eating with."

After a long, considering pause, the villain lifted her sleeves to the sides of her cowl. A twitch was enough to flick it back from her head, revealing a visage of pure night, a shockingly dark, impossibly gaping void cut from the cheery yellow backdrop of their kitchen. 

On second look, it wasn't the solid black hole, the sucking emptiness, that it appeared, but a mass of writhing tendrils instead—tangled and seething, squirming in a vague imitation of humanity, like a nest of vipers dumped over a person's head, barely clinging to it for form; or a plume of black smoke trapped in a bulb, wisps and tendrils tickling against the inner glass, ever a moment of inattention from breaking free.

Sara took a quick, nervous gulp of water. 

"Okay," she gurgled. "That's cool, you can put it back on now. Thanks."

Even without a face to show it, there was something of a smug smirk in the way Tenebre tugged her cowl back over her shadowy form.

"The potatoes?" Kwesi prompted, voice strained.

Sara reached for them, but Tenebre was faster. A jolt of shadow shot from her sleeve, out across the table. Hardwired to fight that exact movement, Sara all but leaped for her sword—until she saw the shadow coil around the bowl of potatoes and lift it into the air. While she settled back into her seat, the shadows carried the potatoes over to Kwesi, even solicitously held the bowl at a serving angle, until he cautiously helped himself to a scoop. 

"Look." Sara's heart was still pounding. She hoped it didn't show in her voice. "Tenebre... Tenny... Ten, can we call you that?"

This was met with an affronted silence, which she took for a yes. "If you won't show your true face—"

"—showed face showed self light exposed supers rejected not the face they wanted to see not fair not possible—"

"You're _here_ ," Sara talked over the senseless chanting, until it faded, "because you helped us take out one of the Wicked Wyvern's strongholds, at a time when we were— when we had lost—" She took another sip of water. "You helped us, and you promised more. Now it's time. If not your face, then show us our trust in you wasn't misplaced. How do we get into his fortress? How do we take the Wyvern down?"

" _His_ fortress?" the shadows whipped up into a frenzy, and Kwesi hastily caught the bowl of potatoes as it dropped right through. "—upstart claims what is mine and you all allow him I made that fortress what it is they were primates banging rocks together hoping for flame before me and they too will perish like apes—"

Sara and Kwesi exchanged a wide-eyed look. "Uhh, upstart? We've been fighting the Wyvern for decades. Kwesi's dad was fighting them when he was a toddler."

A sullen silence. Then, "—I took the fortress from him but it was a hovel a cave I built I created it's mine how dare—"

"We don't care whose fortress it is!" Sara said. "Yours, the Wyvern's, or—or Mickey Mouse for that matter! Can you help us get in or not?"

"Easy, Sara." Kwesi sounded calm, but Sara noticed that he was cutting his potato into smaller and smaller pieces, until it was practically mash under his fork. "Let her get through dessert before we move into interrogation mode, huh? I have a pie in the oven—"

Tenebre lifted her arms, and darkness shot from them. This time, Sara was on her feet, sword in her hands, chair knocked over at her feet, before she realized that the shadows were sketching a picture on the wall, shaping themselves to form jittery, shaky lines, like an old-fashioned projector. As the lines squirmed into place, they formed boxes and hashes and even neat little labels. 

A floor plan.

As Sara righted her chair, guiltily sat back down once more, Tenebre turned her hood towards her. 

Instead of letting out a hiss of fervent speech, this time she only dropped a single, sardonic syllable: "Trust?"

***

"Hold on," said Kwesi, waving his fork. It was half an hour later, and he had a slice of warm pie with a scoop of ice cream on top, which both women had been too proud to accept. Sara looked at it with longing, and wondered abruptly if Tenebre was doing the same. "I still don't understand how we get past that landing. I don't know if you noticed, but this one doesn't exactly come in stealth size."

"Hey!" Sara said. 

"Lumberjack build," Kwesi continued, unrepentant now that he had pie. "Good for sword swinging. Bad for creeping around."

"—in from lower entrance," Tenebre sighed out, like a blast of cutting, exasperated wind, "two guards at the door two patrolling vulnerable sloppy then stairs—"

"Back up," Sara interrupted, frowning now too. "You still haven't answered Kwe— M-path's question. How do we get past the guards?"

"—already _said_ supers need to clean out their ears and listen only four guards two and two if supers can only kill one between them I will take care of others—"

"Who said anything about kill? Weren't these your people before?"

Tenebre turned her blank, exasperated hood toward Kwesi and let out another hiss, "—my people yessss I have seen watched closely observed scum and filth low lives all—"

"You're not taking this seriously!" Sara said, before they could get another senseless tirade. Killing was sometimes tragic and inevitable, but a plan that started out with murder built in was clearly a non-starter. "We need to get into that fortress, so give us a realistic plan, or— or—"

"Can I have a word with you?" Kwesi cut in. 

"We're having a word now."

Kwesi set down his pie, highlighting his seriousness. "Living room."

Sighing heavily, Sara jabbed her finger at Tenebre. "Stay here. Don't touch _anything_." As she stomped out of the kitchen, it didn't escape her notice how Kwesi rolled his eyes after her, then slid the pie tin closer to the super villain. Ex-villain. Whatever.

A large, squashy couch took up a wall and a corner of their darkened living room, ample space that had once held the six of them—and even longer ago, seven. Sara threw herself onto one of the arms, fuming too much to sink into the comfortable cushions. 

"I think you're letting your emotions get the better of you," said Kwesi, appearing behind her. 

"I'm not getting emotional!" she said, though that wasn't an argument she could win against M-path, of all people. 

"Come on, let me get that cape off you. You're not going to wear that all night, are you?"

Reluctantly, Sara turned, so he could get the shoulder clasps, fingers deft on the fastenings, soothing in their familiarity. It became apparent why he'd offered, when he said, "It's been five years, Sara," and oh-so-carefully tightened his grip on her shoulders. "It's time to move on."

Furious, Sara tried to spin around, but he dug in, and she wasn't about to use her full strength to fight free—that would be crossing a line. Crossing her arms instead, she squeezed her opposite elbows, tightly, tightly, until she felt calm enough to speak, all while he rubbed soothing circles into her back. 

"All the others—Hank, Maddie, everyone—we found their bodies. Priya had no body, no funeral. No grave. Nothing to mourn."

"But... you don't still think..." Kwesi's thumbs dug in, and Sara only realized she was tensing up when the pressure forced her muscles to loosen. Kwesi always gave excellent massages, the cheater. "I'm not saying this to be cruel. It's okay to miss her, it's natural, healthy. But putting yourself in danger on a... a chance, that's not okay. If you go storming the fortress, you know I can't—"

A pause, and she could tell without looking that Kwesi was glancing surreptitiously over his shoulder. 

"You know I can't be there with you," he continued, voice lowered. "We both saw how the Wicked Wyvern's powers affected me last time. You'd be flying solo. I don't like that."

"Not solo."

"No," Kwesi drawled, and the ironic tone finally drew a laugh out of her. Going into enemy territory with her arch nemesis, reformed or not, would be worse than going alone. But the last time they'd tried to "storm the fortress" had been far too costly. Unconsciously, she dug out the locket from under the collar of her super-suit, and found her hand clenching around it. Whatever she did, she could not let that happen again. Tenebre had a plan, one that required their unique talents, and she had the motivation to take down the Wyvern. It was trust her, or risk failing again.

And they couldn't fail again.

"If Priya is still alive, then the Wyvern's fortress is where she would be. I know she wouldn't give up on me. She gave herself up _for_ me... for us. If there's any chance she's still out there, I can't not take it, you know that."

"Why don't you ask her then? Tenebre. If Priya's been a prisoner there all this time, in _her_ fortress, as she says, don't you think she would know?"

A shadow fell over them, and Sara whirled around. Kwesi was backing off guiltily, Sara's cape still hung over his arm. Tenebre was drifting towards them like the ghost of Christmas future.

"We told you to stay put!" said Sara.

"—none of this this whispering none of it not the deal I helped you I help you were to treat me as one of your own—"

"We're not whispering. We were were just... talking about someone." Sara's back suddenly felt cold, and she missed the weight of her cape, or even better, Kwesi's reassuring presence. Well, nothing for it. "Have you... ever seen..."

Laughter spilled from the cowl, hollow and echoing like a handful of dirt on the coffin. "—I have killed hundreds of scared little girls in the wyvern's dungeons strangled them swallowed them devoured have never seen one with face of glass and hair spun from from fiber optic threads—"

Sara felt the words like a punch in the gut. "How did you—?"

A tendril of shadow snaked over her hand, still clutching her locket, and broke off into wisps that threatened to thread in between her fingers. The rest of it snaked up the chain and brushed across the hollow of her throat, a cool touch that made her shiver. She fought the urge to slap it away—not out of politeness, but because she knew from countless battles that her hand would pass right through. 

"—what you try to hide in darkness is not invisible to me," intoned Tenebre, "this girl this tool this weapon in your hand lady knight spectacular swinging your sword until you lost it—"

"Priy— Prism wasn't a tool. She was my best friend. My partner. My everything." Sara pulled back, and to her relief, the shadows released her. "I just want to know: have you seen her?"

The tendrils sucked back into the murky cloak.

For a moment, Sara thought she'd receive an answer. Then Tenebre turned shoulder and drifted from the room without a word.


	2. Dagger

In the middle of the night, Sara's eyes snapped open.

Had she even slept? If so, it could only have been shallowly, her body lying ready to spring awake at the the first sign of—anything. But what?

The street lamps faintly lit her room through the slats in her blinds, showing the gray outlines of pictures on the walls, clothes strewn on her desk, a pair of succulents that were the only plants she could keep alive, and not for lack of trying. Outside, there was the faint rustle of wind through the trees, the occasional sound of a passing car. Nothing amiss.

Then she heard it again—the creak of floorboards, a story below, in a slithering tread that was none of her comrades'—and she felt a calm clarity steal over her. 

There was an intruder in their home, their sanctum, but at least now they knew for sure. It was too much to expect that a villain like Tenebre could change her colors, that she wouldn't have ulterior motives for being here. If anything, it was a relief, not to have to wonder anymore. 

She picked up her sword, slipped on her mask—it made her feel better, all right?—and crept down the stairs, carefully skipping squeaky steps so she wouldn't give herself away as well. 

A suggestion of movement in the living room, and she burst in, sword lighting up like a search beacon, illuminating and casting long shadows behind the couch, the television, the hooded figure in the center of the room. 

She had thought Tenebre would shrink away from the light, like a cockroach, but she didn't so much as twitch to acknowledge the arrival of her greatest rival. She was staring down at the coffee table by the couch, contemplating the jigsaw puzzle laid out upon it, the last one they had attempted as a team, or would ever attempt. The one they'd never finish now. 

Carefully drawing aside the dangling sleeve of her robe, like an ancient calligrapher who didn't want to smear the ink on the page, Tenebre picked up a loose puzzle piece. Then she slotted it into place.

Sara Spectacular saw red. 

"How dare you." She launched herself forward, sword overhead. She wouldn't swing it here, but a beam of caustic light wouldn't damage her home, only burn out the shadows. 

Barely looking, as though she'd known exactly where the strike would come, Tenebre easily sent up a shield of shadow as she ducked aside. Was she that familiar with Sara's moments, after countless skirmishes? Did she really know Sara that well?

The thought should have made her even more furious, but strangely the more she fumed about it, the more the anger seemed to drain out of her, leaving her tired and dull. She tried to lift her sword for another strike, but it felt so heavy all of a sudden, her arms themselves leaden weights. 

Why she was even fighting to begin with?

Why she wasn't in her cozy bed? 

"I know what this is," she realized, but knowing didn't help. Nor did glaring at Kwesi, who had appeared in his pajamas—eyes clenched shut, hands held up, fingers curled over palms. "Kwesi!" she said, more forcefully, trying to muster some of the outrage that she knew she should have felt. They had a rule, no powers on each other—

"Except to prevent imminent harm," Kwesi finished. He opened his eyes, which were glowing a preternatural amber, and hard despite the levity of his tone. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems to be where this is going."

Sara tried to argue, but was cut off.

"Come on, lower your weapons, both of you. Don't make me make you two hug it out, because I will."

That threat, possibly with a touch of power behind it, was enough to get Sara to lower her sword, and Tenebre to suck the writhing shadows back into her sleeve. 

Satisfied, Kwesi released his hold on them, and some of the earlier, simmering fury came back. Sara marched over to the puzzle, and plucked out a piece near where she'd seen Tenebre put hers in. Deliberately dropped it off to the side, and said, "This is not for you."

"Sara," Kwesi said, a warning.

"She's the reason they'll never be back!" Sara thrust her finger at the figure lurking in her living room. "Why we'll never have another puzzle night. Why we'll never finish this damn basket of kittens and balls of yarn."

"It looks like she's trying to help you finish it."

"She's not a part of this puzzle!" Sara snapped, aware that she was sounding childish. Kwesi had that effect on people. "The people who started it are dead!"

"Then we'll put this one away," Kwesi said patiently. "We can start a new puzzle night. How about it, Tenebre? It's... relaxing. Seems like we could all use a little of that."

Tenebre made a move towards the puzzle again, and Sara planted herself in the way. "If you try to take these kittens apart, it's going to be you who leaves this room in pieces, I promise you." 

The threat barely gave Tenebre pause. Instead she lifted her sleeves, and shadows began to unspool from them, forming a sheet of darkness, floating in the air. When it was big enough, it flitted past Sara, passing right through her grip as she'd known it would, even as she tried to grab it. Like a magic carpet, it eased smoothly under the puzzle—partial fragments, loose pieces, and all—and then rolled the whole thing up, like a burrito. Even Sara could see that not a single piece had been jostled out of place. 

She'd never seen anything like it.

After all this time, all these fights, against someone she considered her arch nemesis, it was unsettling to discover a new level of precision and control to the powers she used on the battlefield.

"There, see?" Kwesi said, voice a little tight. "Nice and secure. You can look at it whenever you want. Right?"

Silently, Tenebere handed the roll over. Somehow, the bundle of shadows was solid in Sara's hands, texture a bit like velvet, but thin enough that she could feel the ridge of individual pieces secured within.

"All I see," Sara said, "is the same villain we've been fighting for years."

But she took the bundle with her as she marched off.

***

Breakfast the next morning was just as awkward as dinner had been the night before. Worse, because if any of them had slept much since The Great Puzzle Debacle, Sara saw no sign of it. It was her turn to cook, and after she sluggishly flipped the bacon, she had to think long and hard about what part of the egg to put in the pan and what part went into the trash.

Kwesi was slumped over his coffee, as if too tired to even drink it.

Tenebre, for her part, was having no trouble with the oatmeal that she'd found in their cabinets. She had it held halfway to her cowl, and was funneling it up somehow with a frankly repulsive speed, as though sucking it through an invisible straw.

"You want some protein with that goop?" Sara said, coming over with the frying pan, and almost managed not to sound disgusted. Look how friendly she was being. 

The super-villain paused in her guzzling, but otherwise didn't acknowledge her. 

Kwesi shot over a Look, which she found unfair. She'd offered! 

"How about I slice a peach into that for you?" he said. "Sara went a little nuts at the farmer's market last weekend."

Sara opened her mouth to protest the idea of _her_ peaches going into a _villain's_ oatmeal. But that offer got the human vacuum to pause. When she lowered the bowl, it was mostly empty. After a while, a spoon popped out from the opening of her hood, and clattered into the bottom of the bowl. 

"Okay, I'm out," Sara said. She split the bacon onto two plates. Kwesi could have his here if he wanted. She was taking hers to go.

"Team bonding today," Kwesi called after her.

"There's no team bonding," she said flatly as she left. "We're not a team."

Kwesi hastily finished slicing the peach into Tenebre's bowl, and then hurried after her, licking the juices from his hand. 

"We don't have to be BFFs," he said as he caught up. "We don't even have to like each other, that's never what team bonding has been about. It's so we can get comfortable enough to work with each other in the heat of combat. When we went on a mission with... with the others, I knew I could trust us to have each others' backs."

"We had each others' backs because we all were friends," she said. "Family, even. _That's_ what made us such a great team, Kwesi. I know you think she can help us take down the Wyvern, but you just can't expect me to work with her. I don't even like her!" 

"Not everyone in our 'family' liked each other either," Kwesi said, a little too gently. 

Sara froze. "What are you saying?"

They had been fighting crime together for years—for decades, some of them. Living together, sharing each others' space. Knowing each other better than blood, better than lovers. What on Earth was Kwesi talking about?

"Look. You're Sara Spectacular, of the Spectacular Sev... Six." The years hadn't smoothed out the hitch in his voice, as he mentally subtracted one from their number. She didn't have the heart to remind him to subtract again, that it was just the two of them now. "Of course we all loved you. But maybe that just made it harder for you to see some of the tensions in the rest of the team. We didn't all get along."

"You? Someone didn't get along with you? Who?" Kwesi was the most easy-going, kind-hearted person she knew. How could any of her family have disliked him?

"Let's not speak ill of the dead," Kwesi said. "Suffice it to say, if you need to grin and put your feelings aside for the team, you won't exactly be the first to bear that cross. Get me?"

"Kwesi, I didn't... I had no idea. You should have said something—"

"Team bonding," said Kwesi firmly. "2PM. Be there."

"Fine." Over Kwesi's shoulder, Sara spotted Tenebre drifting out from the kitchen, looking to nose into their business again. The sight was like a bucket of cold water poured over her. "2PM. But we're still not a team."

***

2PM found the not-team gathered in the living room, around the coffee table. Something about being sprawled out on the carpet like this always reminded Sara of childhood: the lack of furniture, maybe, or being so close to the ground. She had a stack of cushions half holding up her back, while Kwesi leaned against the couch.

It was hard to tell how Tenebre was sitting, between the cloak and the swirling shadows around her, but she gave the impression of rigid, uncomfortable shoulders, ramrod spine. Served her right. 

With a flourish, Kwesi presented a fresh jigsaw puzzle from their supply, a boring forest scene. It wasn't until he set the box down, and a shadowy tendril snaked out from Tenebre's cloak, slow and tentative, to trace the head of the deer, that Sara wondered if deeper thought had gone into this choice than she'd expected. Come to think of it, Tenebre had picked the deer chair in at the kitchen table, as well. Sara shot a narrow-eyed look over Tenebre's hood, bowed with concentration, and Kwesi returned it with an expression of innocence.

When he went to dump the pieces out onto the table, he was stopped by another shadowy touch. Tenebre summoned a second blank sheet of shadow, draping it over the entire working surface, and then motioned him to go ahead. 

"Easy cleanup," Kwesi said, too positively. "Nice, I like it." He poured the pieces out, and held the box halves over his head, like flags. "All right, let's get edge-hunting!"

Pushing past the awkwardness, Sara began digging through the pieces. A corner appeared, and she reached for it, only for shadowy fingers to snatch it first. She could have slammed her hand down, begun a tug-of-war, but she managed to restrain herself, and let the piece go.

Kwesi would be proud, if he weren't thoroughly engrossed in constructing one of the edges, a growing strip of green and black foliage appearing under his fingers. 

After a few minutes of this, Sara said, "So about the mission tomorrow..."

"No work talk," Kwesi said absently. He was rummaging through the pile for any pieces with orange on them, for the flowers in the corner. "This is supposed to be fun." Tenebre unceremoniously dumped a handful... tendril-ful... of orange pieces in front of him, and he looked up in surprise. "Hey, thanks!"

"I just wanted to know," Sara insisted, "if we're bringing Tenebre with us."

"Shouldn't we?" Kwesi looked surprised. "We're only doing this to get the components we need for her plan."

"Well, yes, but we'll be among civilians. Won't it be a bad look to show up with a super-villain?" 

Kwesi frowned at her.

"Ex-super-villain, then."

"I don't want your first outing together to be in the Wicked Wyvern's fortress," Kwesi said. "Think of this as a trial run, to see how well the two of you work together. What do you think, Tenebre?"

A long sigh issued from Tenebre's hood, and she sat back from the table. A frosty gale issued from her hood, carrying snatches of annoyed muttering: "—my plan naturally my presence will be essential — supers could never succeed without my guidance — if supers are squeamish about witnesses you should well have the capacity to end them—"

"Whoa!" Kwesi said. "We're not putting murder back on the table, are we? Because that's not happening."

Sara didn't see why he was so surprised. That was who Tenebre was, a villain. Out loud, Sara said, "All right, the good guys are too stupid to do this without you, we hear you. We'll take you with us. And if you make one wrong move, it'll be you we "end", not the civvies. You and me fighting, that'll look more natural to any bystanders anyway."

She glared at Tenebre, and thought she received one back, though it was hard to tell under the hood.

"So!" Kwesi jumped in before they could come to blows again—alarmed, either for the well-being of his living room, or of his team-bonding activity. "Uhh, Tenebre, why don't you tell us a little about, um... Wicked Wyvern?" 

He had the look of someone who'd randomly cast about for a topic, but was quickly warming up to it.

"What's he like? Is he really a wyvern? We've never seen him, only felt the, you know." Kwesi waved his hand around his temple, to indicate the telepathic screaming. It should have been a silly, floppy gesture, but Sara had to repress a shudder. Five years later, she could still remember the awful, dissonant cacophony in her head. And that was just her: she couldn't imagine what Kwesi had experienced, with his powers. Enough to render him comatose. Enough that he hadn't woken for the entire trek back, head lolling against her shoulder, nor for days afterwards, nursing him back to health, mourning Priya's loss, wiping her face of tears every time he stirred, so he wouldn't wake to her despair.

"—he's a voice in your head whispering knowing things he has no right to know," came Tenebre's chilly tones. As she spoke, she picked up volume and fervor, until it was nearly a shout coming from her, "everything about you that you don't want to believe because you don't want those things he knows about you to be true you don't want to be the person he thinks you are but you ARE—"

"Hey!" Sara surprised herself by vaulting over the coffee table. It was only when she got to Tenebre's side that she realized she had no clue what to do when she got there, if it wasn't to fight. Awkwardly, she patted the hooded figure's back, like she was trying to pound a cough out of her. "No work talk, remember?" She pointed to the puzzle laid out behind her. "We having fun yet?"

"We'll get him," Kwesi said. Trust him to get to the heart of the issue. "The plan is good. We'll get this done."

"What do you even need me for anyway?" Sara asked. "You could have done this anytime yourself. Why come to us?"

A low rumbling sound issued from Tenebre's form. It took Sara a moment to realize it was laughter. "—uniquely capable super sara spectacular of defeating him you can smash his source of power must be you—"

"So you're saying... it's because of her guns," Kwesi finished, raising an eyebrow.

"Because of my guns," Sara repeated, bemused. Trying to play a long, she exaggerated a flex, only for Kwesi to swat her in the bicep. 

"Put that away, Sara. No work stuff, I told you. Now, who has an edge with blue flowers?"

***

That night, Sara woke from a dream about puzzle pieces that floated just out of reach. The faint sound from downstairs came again, and she groaned. Unlike the night before, when she'd been relieved, even eager, to catch her arch-nemesis in the act, tonight she had no idea what she'd find when she went down there. 

A super-villain turned on them, finally showing her true colors? Or just an ex-villain skulking around, poking at their things? 

A threat? Or just a pest?

She wanted to close her eyes and ignore it, but that wasn't exactly heroic of her. When the sound came again, she grumpily swung out of bed.

"Something wrong with the bed we gave you?" she would drawl, she decided, as she went down the stairs, as silently as possible. 

Or maybe, "Guilty conscience keeping you up at night?" 

The sounds were coming from the living room, like last time. Sara had a moment of anger that the villain might be messing with their puzzle again, before her sleepy brain remembered that they'd already invited Tenebre to partake. So what the hell did she want?

Deciding to catch her by surprise, Sara swung around the doorway, and shone a faint cone of light into the room. It caught on a tattered edge of robe, flared out with motion, as Tenebre spun around the tight space, dipping and swaying to an inaudible melody. In the dim light, she looked like she'd come out of an old black-and-white silent film. Motes of dust flew in the air around her, catching in the beam of light like television static, like imperfections in the film. Every time she made a graceful twirl, a practiced dip, there was the suggestion of curved hip, slender limb, underneath her robes. So there was a body in there after all, amidst the shadow.

As the dance came to a end, she looked up, and finally seemed to notice Sara standing there staring. For a moment, they were both frozen in place, gazes locked, eyes meeting empty hood. 

Then Tenebre rushed across the room at her, arms outstretched, shadows extending before them like the sweeping V in front of a locomotive. 

Sara dodged to the side and said, "Finally!" just as her enemy turned around, impossibly quick, and flung a handful of shadows at her. Sara put up a barrier just in time, and saw three dark points thud against her shield of light, sharp and clear as pinprick stars in the night sky. 

Tenebre's arsenal was full of long-range shots like this. That was why Sara was caught by surprise when the cloaked figure charged at her again, throwing herself bodily into the fight rather than staying at a distance like she always did. There was surprising strength in the villain, enough to bowl them both over, and land a solid blow on Sara's face besides. Sara managed to turn, flipping Tenebre off of her with her own momentum, and rub her stinging mouth. Her hand came away bloody, and she grinned as she got to her feet, adrenaline singing sweetly in her veins, the thud of her heartbeat drowning out all her other questioning. 

"I've been waiting for this."

It was like their previous fight had never been interrupted, like all their battles over all the years they'd been fighting came with a pause button. An exchange of blows was all it took for them to get back into it, pick up where they had left off, like a partial jigsaw puzzle unrolled. She managed to return the punch with a fist sheathed in light, connecting with something solid—though whether it gave Tenebre a split lip, whether she even had blood to leak, was impossible to tell. 

In all their fights so far, Tenebre had fought from a distance, sending out her shadows to do the dirty work, but in the close quarters of the living room, the villain had nowhere to flee to. Sara closed in gleefully, but just as she was about to catch her in a tackle, she spotted the coffee table behind the hooded figure, and swerved on instinct. 

The awkward movement landed her squarely in Tenebre's grasp, and with a sudden rush of vertigo she found herself on the carpet, squarely pinned down by the unfair advantage of too many limbs formed of writhing shadow. 

Sara squirmed up against the hold until she was weak and panting, but there was no give. Jerking her arm sharply seemed to catch her captor by surprise, until she realized Tenebre was actually pulling her arm up for her. Extra tendrils emerged, to slide down the sleeve of her pajamas, and then the hood lowered, lowered, until there was a touch of something cool and soft against the crook of her inner elbow. Almost a... a...

A kiss. 

Too stunned to react, she held still as the feel of what was unmistakably lips traced their way up her arm, pushing the bunched-up sleeve back and back until it could yield no more exposed skin. Then Tenebre dropped her arm—releasing it, but Sara had no thought of moving it from where it had fallen—and bent down to claim her mouth instead. 

The new kiss landed askance—a cool, tender balm against the heat of the swollen corner of her lip—and Sara melted into it. 

Still breathing raggedly, she turned her face a quarter of an inch and pressed her mouth upwards, seeking, finding—yes, a mouth, chin, a nose—actual, human features under those shifting shadows, soft, solid, tender. Each rapid, urgent point of contact sent a searing burst of sensation and discovery through her, until she managed to join their lips together solidly at last, like the final piece in a puzzle.

When Tenebre tried to pull away, a surge of desperation helped Sara finally tear her other arm free—only so she could latch them both around the back of that dark head, tug down the hood and sink her fingers into the bed of shadows, finding cool, silky hair beneath, and the hard curve of skull behind it. Without thinking, she pulled Tenebre in, and then it was all over, they were kissing and necking and her hands were roaming all over, tugging off robes, finding sharp shoulder blades, the sweet dip between them, palming over hanging breast and sloping waist, none of which a moment ago she would have expected existed beneath those robes, each perfect and lovely and startling in its mundanity. 

A part of her was screaming at her that this was wrong, that this woman was responsible for so many deaths, but then a faint touch ghosted into her own clothes, brushing between her legs, firm and sure, sending a spark of hot pleasure burning through her. The touch paused, almost as if asking permission, and Sara could have exploded with impatience.

"Let me—" she said, reaching out uncertainly. She didn't know what to touch, only knew that she wanted to, desperately, and to her relief a shadowy hand pulled her in closer, dragged her finger down supple flesh, to a place where it parted underneath her touch and drew out a soft, soft sigh from the villain perched above her. Tenebre ground down against her hand, and Sara—

For a moment, Sara was transported back to another time. Tangled with Priya, in a bed too small to hold the both of them. Exploring each other, trading pleasure and finding it multiplied between them, until they could hardly distinguish whose was whose. 

Then a sharp silver pain exploded in the join of her neck and shoulder, dragging her back to the present. Priya had never been rough with her.

"So you have teeth under there too," Sara laughed, breathless. "Why don't you show me what else you've got?"

Afterwards, Sara found herself lying on the carpet with an arm full of shadows, stroking Tenebre's face, as if she might be able to brush the shadows aside, even for a moment, to look at the woman underneath. Instead she felt only smooth, cool cheek, and a streak of wetness that felt suspiciously like tears. 

Before she could wipe them away, Tenebre was drawing back with a hiss, swiping her hands side. 

"Hey, easy," Sara soothed, and beckoned with her fingers, as if trying to summon a cat.

Instead of responding, Tenebre flowed into her clothes—or rather, the robes crawled up her shadowy form, covering her, containing her. When it was done, she sidled a little farther away. 

Yeah, cats didn't tend to like her either. 

In the darkness, it was hard to tell if she'd left the room completely, or was lurking at the edges. Sara was seized with a strange urge to keep her here, no matter what. 

"It was my fault," she said abruptly, unsure now if she was talking into an empty room. The words hung in the air above her, unfortunate, and she couldn't have taken them back if she'd wanted to. "She was taken, saving me. I was careless, I led us into an impossible battle. At the fortress. Against the Wicked Wyvern. That's why I need to save her, do you understand?"

When Tenebre's voice came, it was somehow more cramped and seething than ever, "—asks if she is understood as if she's not an open book a toddler could read only thing I fail to understand is why she would think of her lover now—"

"I'm sorry. You're right, that was... I guess this reminded me of... I'm sorry."

The intimacy that they had shared was stretching to its breaking point. Speaking hadn't helped. Sara wondered if silence would help to preserve it. 

But it must not have worked, because long as she waited, she never received a response. 


	3. Cape

In the morning, Kwesi took one look at Sara, and then came back for a double take. Whatever he saw on her face, or her uncharacteristic turtleneck, it shot his eyebrows up into space.

"Stop it! Stop it, Kwesi. No powers!" Sara closed the rest of the distance and covered his eyes with her hands, wishing desperately she had some way to cover his empathetic senses with them too. 

"Hey, don't blame me for hearing what you're screaming from the rooftops. Now let go, I'm going to burn the pancakes!"

"Not until you promise to cut it out!"

"Cut what out? I didn't even say anything!" 

Sara let go, just so she could point an accusing finger in his face. "Impure thoughts! You're thinking them! Stop it!"

"Oh, thoughts can be a crime now? You should tell yourself that, coming down here lit up like a Christmas tree—"

"Stop! Stop, I don't want to know how it works."

Still grinning impishly, Kwesi gave the pancakes a flip. He was making four in the same pan, and went over them all with quick, deft movements. Then he got serious and said, "Nah, I won't harp on you. Just answer me one thing: are you being... careful?"

"You know I am." She scooped up the top pancake from the done plate, dancing it between her fingertips and her teeth as she scarfed down the hot treat. "It's not like I'm— We're not— It's fine, trust me."

True to his word, when Tenebre drifted down, he offered no comment with the bowl of oats he set down in front of her. Sara was the one who found herself having to look away, before she blushed. "We need to get you on the cooking rotation," she said gruffly, to cover up the moment of awkwardness. She had no illusions that it fooled anyone.

"—not a team," came Tenebre's chilling voice, with a surprising amount of snark, "—not a team but must serve on the rotation—"

"We'll figure it out." Sara snatched the fresh pancake from Kwesi's spatula, as he made to put it on the plate. "We all ready to go after this? Off to get the doohickey you need to turn off the Wyvern's security whatever?" 

Instead of snark this time, Tenebre's voice was laced with disdain. "—not a _doohickey_ not security _whatever_ thick headed super never listens never learns—"

"It's an amplification... thing... that the Wyvern uses to extend his powers, right?" Kwesi said hurriedly. Mollified, Tenebre began tucking into her oatmeal. "You said we can turn it off with this..." 

"...doohickey," Sara finished, and Tenebre spat out her mouthful. "Well, if you say the DomiMatrix is working on one for her own nefarious plans, it won't be the first time we've taken her down." She cast another look at the empty seats around the table, and didn't mention that it had been with a much larger team, before. 

"Are you sure it's okay to just steal it?" Kwesi said, into the silence. "Seems a little... morally gray."

"If she's really starting up old tricks again, we'll have to take her out anyway. I don't have a problem taking her evil toys and using them for good. Ish. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right?"

"Hmm," said Kwesi, around a bite of pancake. He hadn't even bothered to take a seat, and was eating hunched over the stove. Typical.

Sara set him a place at the table, and waited while he was between bites to migrate his plate over. Kwesi rolled his eyes, but followed. "I'm just saying, if taking out a baddie we were going to have to fight anyway will help get us into that fortress... it's all right by me. Like a light gray at best. Slate. Eggshell." Sara followed up with syrup from the fridge, and poured Kwesi a glass of milk while she was at it.

"I don't think those are even real colors," said Kwesi. But he took the milk, with a reluctant sigh of thanks.

"We might not even see her, right? Sneak in to her building as office drones, get into the labs, get out. Sounds like a boring mission, if you ask me."

Kwesi hastily swallowed his bite. "Why did I get a bad feeling when you said that?"

***

Kwesi needn't have worried. The DomiMatrix ran her operations out of an innocuous business park, a nondescript skyscraper in a cluster of nondescript skyscrapers. M-Path and Sara Spectacular made it in with the morning bustle. Tenebre, not exactly inconspicuous, waited at a distance, hissing into their earpieces with sharp, impatient sighs.

"You know you can mute that, right?" Sara muttered, as they waited to scan their badges, which were actually just hasty printouts in a plastic sleeve. M-Path elbowed her, but the static and heavy breathing stopped, so that was a win, as far as she was concerned. 

When Sara got to the front of the line, she pressed her card against the reader, and focused on bending the little beams of light. Tenebre had explained, in her usual abstruse way, how these things worked, but it had flown over Sara's head. Eventually, she'd resorted to picking out a picture of the mechanism with shadows on the wall. Something to do with how the pattern of LEDs shone through the holes in the card—Sara still didn't fully understand it, but she could memorize which way to bend a bunch of light beams, at least. It was almost like a puzzle. Soon enough, the thing gave a happy chirp, and she was through. 

"Back to the old salt mines, eh?" she said to the security guard, who handed her back her bag with a stare. That sounded natural, right? She'd always wanted to say that. 

She got M-Path through with a little more light magic, and they were on the first floor of the DomiMatrix's lair. As super-villain hideouts went, it was spacious and pristine, all glass windows, marble floors, and over it all, a bustle of voices and activity and immaculately-dressed bodies hurrying to unknown destinations. The two of them blended right in, Sara in a turtleneck and slacks, M-Path in the suit he'd worn to each of the recent funerals—

Sara cut off that line of thinking, and made a beeline for the coffee stand. 

"Do we really have time for this?" said M-Path, belatedly following behind her. 

"Part of my cover," Sara said. She handed over some bills, and grinned at the barista. "Mondays, am I right?"

"It's Tuesday, ma'am."

"Is it?" Sara took a sip of the drink she was handed. Hot and delicious. She was really getting into this role. What else did businesspeople say? Oh yes, of course. "Hang in there!"

"Can we even take that into the lab?" M-Path said, as they got on the elevator.

"We're breaking in," Sara punched the button for the right floor, and did her light show again. The elevator gave an equally cheery beep as it started its ascent. "I think if someone's there to yell at me about my drink, we have bigger problems."

Just then, the elevator doors swung open. As they got off, a man in a white lab coat got on, and they did an awkward dance to avoid a collision. After he passed, the guy swiveled his head to watch them go by. "Hey, no drinks in the—"

The elevator closed on him.

"I told you," M-Path hissed. 

"It's fine," Sara said, heart racing. She gulped the rest of the coffee, and threw the cup in a convenient bin. When she started walking again, her pace was just a little more rushed than usual. "He's gone, it's fine."

They rushed down the hall, checking the numbers on the doors as they went. The correct room was dark and empty, rows of lab benches covered with mysterious electronic components and monitors. By unspoken agreement, Sara began with the cupboards on the side of the room, while M-Path went to the back. After a few minutes of hasty shuffling, M-Path let out a triumphant cry, and waved something in the air. 

Sara turned, grin forming on her lips—which immediately dropped, as the alarms sounded. 

"I told you!" M-Path pulled his mask on over his face. "The coffee—"

"No time to talk," Sara interrupted hastily. She ripped off her turtleneck, to expose the spandex underneath it, and self-consciously touched the mark on her neck. Hoping M-Path hadn't seen, she pulled her hair over it as she kicked off her heels for the boots in her bag. "The window, it's the only way."

"No one on this floor yet," M-Path said, focusing on his other senses. "Elevator has two people, but they seem confused... yeah, they're going past our floor."

Sara gathered the light around herself, forming helm and breastplate, sword and shield. As she strode over to the window, her reflection in the tinted glass gave her pause, as it always did. Even five years later, she still expected to see herself armored in prismatic light, a pride flag of rainbow colors swirling all over her. Now, without Priya, without Prism, they were just a bland, blinding monotone. 

M-path was trying to raise Tenebre on the communicator, without much luck. Well, there was no time to waste. About to knock the windowpane out, Sara saw that the streets below were lousy with pedestrians. Instead, she shone her sword through the glass, where it reformed a hammer of light on the other side. With a gesture, she smashed the hammer back towards her, and glass shattered inwards, rather than out. A chill wind ripped through the new opening, billowing her cape behind her. They were really high up.

"No response from our favorite villain?" she asked. "You don't think she..."

"None." M-path closed his eyes. 

Sara spotted a dark cloaked figure on the ground just as M-path said, "Wait, I sense her. She's down there, she's ready to catch us."

"Then why didn't she respond?" A beat. Then: "Tenebre, your mic is muted."

There was a commotion from out in the hall, and Sara knew the time was up. "Come on—oh god," she groaned suddenly.

"What?" M-path demanded, "What's wrong?"

"How much more classic team bonding can you get? You're going to love this."

"What are you talking about?"

"We're going to have to do trust falls, aren't we?"

M-path's mask didn't cover the roll of his eyes. He jumped first, and Sara followed. For a heart-stopping, hair-whipping moment, there was nothing but the free fall, the rush of air ripping by her, filling her nostrils. Then shadows bloomed from the ground, rising up in a great tide. Sara had been fighting these shadows for so long that she nearly lashed out against them, but then she was caught up in a soft cocoon that cradled her, rocked the momentum from her descent, and finally set her on the ground with surprisingly care. 

Next to her, M-path was also on his feet. "Hey, thanks! We got the doohickey. Let's go?"

From above, more glass exploded outwards, a continuous cascade as the windows a floor above each burst out, one by one. 

"Bots!" yelled M-path, as Sara immediately flung up a shield of light over the gathered civilians. It helped that they were all huddled together in shock, the shield was just big enough to cover them—

Until, with a shriek, a child broke away, and ran right out into the open. 

There wasn't any time to react, to yell. Sara tracked up from the child's head and saw the exact chunk of glass that would land on him—

But it didn't. A bolt of shadow streaked over the kid, and then stretched, bowed in the middle like a rubber sheet, like a tongue poking into a flat of chewing gum. The sheet absorbed the projectile's momentum, slowing it until the protrusion came to a stop just above the kid's forehead, pausing so close it ruffled his hair. Then the sheet bounced back the other way, and the glass flew out, and clattered harmlessly to the side. 

"T... Tenny..." said Sara, earning herself a what was clearly an irritated glare from under that hood.

"—was I supposed to let the brat die supers said we can't kill even if it it would make things much much easier must do things the hard way my name is not _Tenny_ —"

"That's not what I... I mean, how did you know I..." Tenebre had seen Sara's dilemma in the blink of an eye, had covered the gap in her shield like it was second nature. "Am I really that easy to read?"

"—to me you are."

Sara supposed that was fair. After all the years they'd spent fighting, learning each others' moves and instincts, strengths and weaknesses, it would have been surprising if Tenebre didn't know her as well as her former teammates. Better, even.

"Guys," M-path cut in. "We got incoming. And there aren't exactly any minds in those bots, so I'm going to need you two to handle it, while I get the bystanders out of here."

As he hurried off, and the incoming robots bore down on them, Sara exchanged a look with Tenebre. They were in perfect understanding here, at least. 

Finally, something to fight. 

***

After the mission, exhausted, victorious, they each retreated to their own rooms. Sara felt a distinct lack of surprise when her door creaked open, not long after, and Tenebre crept in.

Without the excuse of adrenaline this time, with no moment to be caught up in, Sara considered telling the other woman to get out. But something made her scoot over in bed, and receive the cloaked figure with open arms.

Later, after they'd finished inspecting each other's wounds, soothing them with fingers, murmurs, lips and tongue, she said, curiously, "What does this feel like for you?"

Tenebre was quiet for long enough she thought she might not get an answer. But then: "—I'm in a well a deep deep well the earth is chill around me — a hand appears in my brief circle of sky I can I feel the faint heat of it radiate all the way down to me or — or is it just remembrance is it imagination does my mind fill in what it knows it should be—"

Sara kissed her again, unsettled but trying to project reassurance nonetheless. "As long as you like it, it doesn't matter if you're feeling what you're supposed to."

Unconvinced silence was her only response.

"Just... relax, okay? Tomorrow is the big day. Can I trust you at my back?" She twirled a finger in a tendril of shadow, and was charmed when it wrapped around her, like pasta on a fork. "If you're going to betray us, now would be a good time, thanks." 

"Trust?" said Tenebre, a single ironic syllable that reminded Sara of her first night here. 

But this time, what the ex-villain swept her gaze over was Sara's naked, relaxed body, her sword lying clean across the room, far out of arm's reach. 

"Yeah," Sara said. "Fair." 

And she sank back into the shadowy embrace. If this wasn't trust, what was?


	4. Cowl

The fortress was exactly as Tenebre had described. Sara had memorized every inch of the floor plan, and it was something of a magic trick to see it recreated before her eyes, in stone and ivy rather than shadows painted on the wall. 

They were approaching from a different direction than her last, ill-fated attempt five years ago, but when they got within range, that same screeching filled her head, no different than last time. She couldn't understand a word of it, but she thought it was trying to tell her things, make her think things, if it didn't hurt too much to listen. She could only be glad M-Path was waiting at a distance; it had been way worse for him before.

Gritting her teeth, Sara broke open the grate she was asked to break, then the humming mechanism embedded within. The doohickey went into the exposed slot, and—like a blessing—the screeching noise in Sara's head disappeared. The Wicked Wyvern's voice wasn't nearly as loud as they'd assumed, only amplified by what amounted to a loudspeaker.

In the sudden silence, Tenebre triumphantly swished onwards, only stopping to wait, impatiently, for Sara to open the door for her.

The guard patterns were as predicted, and when they got to the landing that had sparked their argument an impossibly long week ago, Tenebre cloaked them both in shadow, and together they sidled right past the guards' view. Smothered in the darkness, Sara might only a few days ago have felt claustrophobic and disgusted, but there was something comforting about its touch now, shielding them from view.

On the other side, she turned to the ex-villain, and tried not to sound too impressed. "If you could have done that all along, why did you keep suggesting the murder?"

Tenebre actually gave a shrug. "Easier," she said, which ruined Sara's mood a little.

There was a guard station beyond the checkpoint. Sara peered in and saw lockers, tables, a microwave. Seemed like a glorified break room. A handful of shadows grasped her by the cape and yanked her back down, and Tenebre emitted a hiss that might have been a shushing sound, or just her normal impatient growl.

"There's no one in there," Sara hissed back, but stayed put, as Tenebre draped her wide sleeves on the stone floor, and shadows began to weave from their openings, growing and stretching across the floor like the ivy vines outside. Fascinated despite herself, Sara watched as the shadows slipped under the door, into the guard station, and came back a moment later with a keycard.

"We didn't need that," said Sara. "I could always do the lights thing. Like at DomiCorp?" 

Apparently Tenebre didn't deem that worth a response, just tucked the card into the depths of her sleeves, and glided away. 

"Or not."

Soon enough, they'd made it to the heart of the fortress, where the Wyvern's power core lay. Tenebre had been cagey about the exact details, or maybe her mutterings were just too hard to decipher. Either way, Sara was eager to see the core at last, even more eager to finally be of use. So far she had felt like deadweight most of this mission, but smash a thing? She could handle that.

Down a long, winding corridor, Tenebre found a nondescript door amidst a row of other nondescript doors. Swiped the stolen keycard. Then waited expectantly, until Sara took the hint, and again pushed forward, to open the door.

The first thing she was hit with was a blast of hot, musty air. She had been expecting machinery maybe, or an alchemical lab. Instead, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light within, she found herself in a cramped, narrow space, no larger than a closet. The ground was soft under her step, and when she cast her light upon it, she saw that it was straw, forming a thick layer of bedding.

And there, nestled in the center of it all, was an enormous, iridescent egg.

Propped upright, it came up to her waist, and was covered with overlapping plates in interlocking swirls of metallic bronzes and golds. 

Sara stopped short, as a sudden dread pooled into her gut.

"This is the Wicked Wyvern?" she said. "He's... just a baby?" Or whatever the word was, for a creature that hadn't even hatched yet, hadn't been _born_ yet. This was their greatest threat?

"—been in that egg for a thousand years growing and plotting still the same wicked still can imagine if he hatched what havoc what chaos—" 

"That's why you needed me? For my brute strength? You want me to smash... not a power core... but an egg? Kill an unborn infant?" She was aware that her voice was rising with hysteria, that she was breathing too quickly, that she was panicking. They had been lied to, betrayed. How could she have trusted this monster after all—

A sudden peace stole over her, and its abrupt wrongness was how she knew M-path had arrived. She started to push past Tenebre, needing to see her friend, needing the comfort, before she remembered the egg at her back, and knew she couldn't leave it unguarded.

M-path appeared in the doorway instead, backlit, haloed by the light from the corridor. "What happened? Is everyone okay? Sara, I felt you—"

Something about seeing him here, in this fortress, terrified her, even through his grip. "What are you doing here?" she said, "What about last time?" Last time, when she'd almost lost him. When she had instead lost the other half of herself, and never been whole again.

"I couldn't let you go into this alone. I felt the Wyvern's voice turn off, so I thought I'd get a little closer. Did you finish it? What's this... room..."

M-path trailed off as Sara stepped aside, revealing the egg. 

"I see," said M-path, as Tenebre turned, looking as if she planned to make her case to him too.

"We can't kill him, right?" Sara said desperately, before Tenebre could give him any ideas. "Right?"

"I can hear him in there." M-path approached the egg, and knelt beside it, in the hay. Pulled off his glove to lay his hand directly upon the scaly surface, bold in the face of the enemy that had crippled him in one of the most devastating defeats in their history. "He's... unconscious. Dreaming. Oh, he's a mess in there. There's something missing in him, something he hasn't learned for... all the centuries he's been gestating. This is something incredibly old, Sara. His lifecycle is on a scale beyond our imagining. In human terms, he'd still be in his mother's womb, but his mother isn't here. No one to teach him right from wrong. He just needs a guiding hand."

"So what? You think you can fix him? Make him see the light? He's done so many terrible things, just like—"

"Just like?" said Kwesi, and Sara hushed, suddenly hyper aware of the ex-villain at her back.

"If his lifespan is on some impossible scale, then won't he outlive you? Even if you give him a few morality lessons now, what's going to stop him after we're gone? Who's to say he won't go back to evil?"

"Don't you think he deserves a chance?" said M-Path simply. He still hadn't taken his hand off the egg. 

Sara opened her mouth to argue, but something about the phrasing gave her pause. A chance. She had come here on a chance—

"Besides, isn't there someone you were looking for?" M-path said, knowingly.

Sara stiffened. With one last look of misgiving at the occupants of the room, all of whom she now suspected to be some level of deluded, she rushed out. They could take care of themselves. There was someone else here— someone else who had to be here— who needed her.

"Where's the dungeon?" she asked Tenebre, as she went by. She heard no response, and stopped, turned, frustrated.

But the hooded figure had silently lifted up her arm, and was pointing with one drooping sleeve.

***

She was still looking when Tenebre arrived. 

"I... I think this was her cell," Sara said, without turning. The dungeons belowground were vast, but she had only wandered a few cells before she'd found this one, as if drawn. In the far corner, at just the right height to be reached when lying down, there were letters scratched into the stone, by countless repetition. Her initials, and Priya's, together. A declaration? Or a cry for help? Sara touched them, grief striking any possibility of other words from her.

Tenebre was silent so long that Sara assumed she must have left. But when Sara got up, there the hooded figure still was, standing just outside the cell. Sara took one step forward—only for Tenebre to slam the door shut on her.

"Tenny," Sara said, stunned. "Tenebre. Is this some kind of joke?"

But Tenebre was already backing away.

"Hey!" Sara charged the cell door, slamming against the bars with a force that rattled them, but they held firm. "Answer me! What is this? What... what was all this?"

She was still waiting for an answer when Kwesi was thrown into the cell next to hers. 

After the guards left, she asked if he was okay, and fell silent after he affirmed. She didn't say anything else to him. She didn't need to—her silence was recrimination enough.

That night she fell into an uneasy sleep, and dreamt of Priya. Glossy black hair slipping through her fingers. A melodious laugh that was patchy, as if through a bad reception. Sara kept circling her, to get a good look at her face, but Priya kept turning away, turning away.

"Wake up," she said, before she'd even fully awakened herself. Her voice was hoarse, and she cleared it. "I think someone's coming." From the cell next to hers, she could hear a rustling: Kwesi dragging himself upright.

When the guard opened the door, she was ready for him. She dove from the ceiling, where she'd been holding herself, arms and legs braced against opposite walls. With an arm around the guard's neck, he was easily subdued.

Maybe too easily.

She couldn't shake the feeling, as she fumbled the keyring from his limp hands, and unlocked Kwesi's cell. 

M-path emerged, and pulled her into a brief hug, before the two of them made their way.

"We need to find that egg," he said, as she retraced her steps.

"Are you serious?" said Sara. "Let her have him. She's already won. She—"

"Sara?"

Realization struck Sara like a brick. "No," she said suddenly. "We have to go back." 

"What? Where?" M-path saw that Sara was heading right back into the dungeon they'd just escaped from, and said, "Now you're the one who can't be serious!" But when he realized that she was determined, he groaned, and hurried after her. That was trust, not some team-building exercise. 

Back in the dungeon, the guard was just starting to stir again. When he saw them, he pressed himself back into the floor, as if attempting to play dead.

Sara hefted him up by the armor, slammed him against the bars of the cell she'd just spent the night in. "Where are the other guards?"

"What other guards?" he wailed, when she shook him.

"Why did she only send one guard? For the two of us? Why?"

The guard was sputtering and flailing, the whites of his eyes showing in his terror, but Sara realized that he wasn't looking at her. He was looking over her shoulder.

There, behind her, was Tenebre in her cloak, filling the doorway, terrible and mighty. 

Sara dropped the guard, who scrambled sideways until he hit a wall.

"Why?" said Sara.

"—obvious obvious so you could overpower him and escape so you'd be gone don't ask when you already know—"

"No," Sara said. "I mean, why did you sacrifice yourself for me? Five years ago, you pushed me from the fortress parapets. Knowing I would be safe. Knowing you would be taken instead. Why? I've always wanted to ask you that, Priya. I've wondered so many times. Why would you do something like that?"

"Priya?" M-path gasped.

Tenebre was silent. When she spoke, it was no longer the onslaught of syllables, but a halting, stumbling staccato. "—do you remember — Kwesi down — you carrying I — couldn't, I wasn't strong enough — you could get away — two of you — my life for two, an easy trade until—" 

"Until what?" Sara said, proud of how steady her voice sounded.

"—until I became — me I all the lives that I took in the years since I — calculus doesn't hold I—"

"Is that really why?" Sara pressed. "A question of... calculus? The two of us, for the one of you?"

The silence this time was longer. Tenebre—Priya—seemed to shrink into herself, and for a moment Sara was seized by the irrational fear that the cloak might shrink away until there was nothing left, and she would have lost Priya again. 

"—prism can produce any light but not on its own it needs — something to shine through it a prism could not live with its light turned to darkness I — you know I couldn't go on without you."

The sudden clarity, finality in that normally tenuous voice. It took Sara's breath away.

It was M-path who said, "So you were turned to darkness instead."

"—wyvern whispered into my ear exposed the darkest parts of me you know how he does that you of all people you know — instead of amplifying S-sssara's light only my own evils to shine out the deepest truest part of me now you see before you now you know like he knew—"

"This isn't you, Priya! This is the Wyvern—"

"HE KNOWS," the hooded figure shrieked, and pushed out with her sleeves. Shadows tore from her form, slamming into Sara, pushing her away, jamming her into M-Path and sweeping them both towards the door.

"Priya!"

"—get out of my fortress you get out take that egg with you if you want smash it if you want next time we meet I'll kill you or you'll kill me it's as it always should have been—"

"But it doesn't have to be this way!" Sara yelled, but as soon as she and M-path cleared the corridor, the door was slammed behind them.

Leaving Priya right where she'd been for the past five years.

Alone, in the Wicked Wyvern's dungeon, with only her own shadows for company.

***

A week later, Sara was back: not in her Spectacular spandex, but in a plain hoodie and jeans, messenger bag slung over her shoulder. The guard didn't seem to know what to make of her, and she waited around impatiently while the two of them took turns making phone calls. Finally, they directed her to something they called the audience room, looking relieved to receive instruction, but confused about the form they'd taken.

Tenebre was waiting for her there, not sitting on a throne on a dais, as Sara might have expected, but lurking in the corner, hunched against the wall, like a spider crept into her own fortress.

"—super has thought about it thought about it now come to take me out at last have you—"

Calmly scoping out her surroundings, Sara chose a nearby table, and swept it of dust. Such a large fortress for one person. So much of it disused.

Behind her, Tenebre was still going on. "—what makes you think you'll emerge victorious lady knight we've clashed before for years for ages I've never known defeat at your hands I never will—"

"I have a secret weapon." And from her bag she pulled the rolled-up sheet of shadow that Tenebre had left behind. Carefully, she unfurled it across the table, revealing the partial jigsaw puzzle that the three of them had started together, the forest, the fawn drinking from the stream.

"What," said Tenebre, uncharacteristically short in her surprise. "—the meaning... what—"

"I know you don't feel like the Priya I remember. Maybe that person is gone. But over the past week—no, over the past five years, I've gotten to know Tenebre. Rather well, actually. We... bonded. Is that all gone too?"

"—you you thought I was on your side I tricked you I betrayed you again I—"

"You said it yourself. I'm thick-headed. I don't learn."

Sara positioned herself on the opposite side of the table, so she could see the puzzle and Tenebre at once. She began to straighten the pieces, trying to pretend as if she wasn't watching closely for a reaction. 

"I'm not expecting things to be the way before. I'm not even expecting you to have manners, or not suggest killing people for the slightest convenience. I just want to finish this puzzle with you. And then, if you want, maybe another. Would that work for you?"

When she found herself smoothing pieces, making tiny adjustments to their positioning, she knew that she was delaying. She looked up, hopefully, and thought that Tenebre had gotten a little closer. Good enough. 

With slow, deliberate movements, she picked up her sword, and pointed it at the ground, casting a chair of light, then another—two of the carved ones from their kitchen table. One was hers. The other was not Priya's, but the one from the head of the table, with the deer and the starling. The one that Tenebre had always chosen, in her short stay with them. 

If she looked closely, she would see. And she would sit.

And maybe that would make all the difference. 


End file.
